ONE IS
NOT
BORN A
WOMAN
MONIQUE
WITTIG
One Is Not Born A Woman (1980)
A materialist feminist approach to women’s oppression
destroys the idea that women are a “natural group”1: “a racial
group of a special kind, a group perceived as natural, a group of
men considered as materially specific in their bodies.”2 What
the analysis accomplishes on the level of ideas, practice makes
actual at the level of facts: by its very existence, lesbian society
destroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a
“natural group.” A lesbian society3 pragmatically reveals that
the division from men of which women have been the object
is a political one and shows that we have been ideologically
rebuilt into a “natural group.” In the case of women, ideology
goes far since our bodies as well as our minds are the product
of this manipulation. We have been compelled in our bodies
and in our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the
idea of nature that has been established for us. Distorted to
such an extent that our deformed body is what they call
“natural,” what is supposed to exist as such before oppression.
Distorted to such an extent that in the end oppression seems
to be a consequence of this “nature” within ourselves (a nature
which is only an idea). What a materialist analysis does by
reasoning, a lesbian society accomplishes practically: not only
is there no natural group “women” (we lesbians are living
proof of it), but as individuals as well we question “woman,”
which for us, as for Simone de Beauvoir, is only a myth. She
said “One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological,
psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that
the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a
whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male
and eunuch, which is described as feminine.” 4
However, most of the feminists and lesbian-feminists in
America and elsewhere still believe that the basis fo women’s
Monique Wittig
1
oppression is biological as well as historical. Some of them
even claim to find their sources is Simone de Beauvoir.5 The
belief in mother right and in a prehistory” when women
created civilization (because of a biological predisposition)
while the course and brutal men hunted (Because of
a biological predisposition) is a symmetrical with the
biologizing interpretation of history produced up to now by
the class of men. It is still the same method of finding in
women and men a biological explanation of their division,
outside of social facts. For me this could never constitute
as lesbian approach to women’s oppression, since it assumes
that the basis of society or the beginning of society lies in
heterosexuality. Matriarchy is no less heterosexual than
patriarchy: it is only the sex of the oppressor that changes.
Furthermore, not only is this conception still imprisoned in
the categories of sex (woman and man), but it holds onto the
idea that the capacity to give birth (biology) is what defines a
woman. Although practical facts and ways of living contradict
this theory in lesbian society, there are lesbians who affirm
that “women and men are different species or races (the
words are used interchangeably): men are biologically inferior
to women; male violence is a biological inevitability…”6
By doing this, by admitting that there is a “natural” division
between women and men, we naturalize history, we assume
that “men” and “women” have always existed and will always
exist. Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently
we naturalize the social phenomena which express our
oppression, making change impossible. For example, instead
of seeing giving birth as a forced production, we see it as a
“natural,” “biological” process, forgetting that in our society
births are planned (demography), forgetting that we ourselves
are programmed to produce children, while this is the only
social activity “short of war”7 that presents such a great danger
of death. Thus, as long as we will be “unable to abandon
by will or impulse a lifelong and centuries-old commitment
to childbearing as the female creative act,”8 gaining control
of the production of children will mean much more than
2
One Is Not Born A Woman
the mere control of the material means of this production:
women will have to abstract themselves from the definition
“woman” which is imposed upon them.
A materialist feminist approach shows that what we take for
the cause or origin of oppression is in fact only the mark9
imposed by the oppressor: the “myth of woman,”10 plus
its material effects and manifestations in the appropriated
consciousness and bodies of women. Thus, this mark does
not predate oppression: Colette Guillaumin has shown that
before the socioeconomic reality of black slavery, the concept
of race did not exist, at least not in its modern meaning,
since it was applied to the lineage of families. However, now,
race, exactly like sex, is taken as an “iommediate given,” a
“sensible given,” “physical features,” belonging to a natural
order. But what we believe to be a physical and direct
perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an
“imaginary formation,”11 which reinterprets physical features
(in themselves as neutral as any others but marked by the
social system) through the network of relationships in which
they are perceived. (They are seen as black, therefore they are
black; they are seen as women, therefore, they are women. But
before being seen that way, they first had to be made that way.)
Lesbians should always remember and acknowledge how
“unnatural,” compelling, totally oppressive, and destructive
being “woman” was for us in the old days before the women’s
liberation movement. It was a political constraint, and those
who resisted it were accused of not being “real” women. But
then we were proud of it, since in the accusation there was
already something like a shadow of victory: the avowal by the
oppressor that “woman” is not something that goes without
saying, since to be one, one has to be a “real” one. We were
at the same time accused of wanting to be men. Today this
double accusation has been taken up again with enthusiasm
in the context of the women’s liberation movement by some
feminists and also, alas, by some lesbians whose political goal
seems somehow to be becoming more and more “feminine.”
Monique Wittig
3
To refuse to be a woman, however, does not mean that one
bas to become a man. Besides, if we take as an example the
perfect “butch,” the classic example which provokes the most
horror, whom Proust would have called a woman/man, how
is her alienation different from that of someone who wants
to become a woman? Tweedledum and Tweedledee. At least
for a woman, wanting to become a man proves that she has
escaped her initial programming. But even if she would
like to, with all her strength, she cannot become a man. For
becoming a man would demand from a woman not only a
man’s external appearance but his consciousness as well, that
is, the consciousness of one who disposes by right of at least
two “natural” slaves during his life span.This is impossible, and
one feature of lesbian oppression consists precisely of making
women out of reach for us, since women belong to men.
Thus a lesbian has to be something else, a not-woman, a notman, a product of society, not a product of nature, for there is
no nature in society.
The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always
meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or
not. For a lesbian this goes further than the refusal of the role
“woman.” It is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and
political power of a man. This, we lesbians, and nonlesbians as
well, knew before the beginning of the lesbian and feminist
movement. However, as Andrea Dworkin emphasizes, many
lesbians recently “have increasingly tried to transform the
very ideology that has enslaved us into a dynamic, religious,
psychologically compelling celebration of female biological
potential.”12 Thus, some avenues of the feminist and lesbian
movement lead us back to the myth of woman which was
created by men especially for us, and with it we sink back
into a natural group. Having stood up to fight for a sexless
society,13 we now find ourselves entrapped in the familiar
deadlock of “woman is wonderful.” Simone de Beauvoir
underlined particularly the false consciousness which consists
of selecting among the features of the myth (that women
4
One Is Not Born A Woman
are different from men) those which look good and using
them as a definition for women. What the concept “woman
is wonderful” accomplishes is that it retains for defining
women the best features (best according to whom?) which
oppression has granted us, and it does not radically question
the categories “man” and “woman,” which are political
categories and not natural givens. It puts us in a position of
fighting within the class “women” not as the other classes
do, for the disappearance of our class, but for the defense of
“woman” and its reenforcement. It leads us to develop with
complacency “new” theories about our specificity: thus, we
call our passivity “nonviolence,” when the main and emergent
point for us is to fight our passivity (our fear, rather, a justified
one).The ambiguity of the term “feminist” sums up the whole
situation.What does “feminist” mean? Feminist is formed with
the word “femme,”“woman,” and means: someone who fights
for women. For many of us it means someone who fights
for women as a class and for the disappearance of this elass.
For many others it means someone who fights for woman
and her defense- for the myth, then, and its reenforcement.
But why was the word “feminist” chosen if it retains the least
ambiguity? We chose to call ourselves “feminists” ten years
ago, not in order to support or reenforce the myth of woman,
nor to identify ourselves with the oppressor’s definition of us,
but rather to affirm that our movement had a history and to
emphasize the political link with the old feminist movement.
It is, then, this movement that we can put in question for the
meaning that it gave to feminism. It so happens that feminism
in the last century could never resolve its contradictions on
the subject of nature/culture, woman/society. Women started
to fight for themselves as a group and rightly considered that
they shared common features as a result of oppression. But for
them these features were natural and biological rather than
social. They went so far as to adopt the Darwinist theory of
evolution. They did not believe like Darwin, however, “that
women were less evolved than men, but they did believe
Monique Wittig
5
that male and female natures had diverged in the course of
evolutionary development and that society at large reflected
this polarization.”14 “The failure of early feminism was that
it only attacked the Darwinist charge of female inferiority,
while accepting the foundations of this charge - namely,
the view of woman as unique.”15 And finally it was women
scholars - and not feminists - who scientifically destroyed
this theory. But the early feminists had failed to regard
history as a dynamic process which develops from conflicts
of interests. Furthermore, they still believed as men do that
the cause (origin) of their oppression lay within themselves.
And therefore after some astonishing victories, the feminists
of this first front found themselves at an impasse out of a
lack of reasons to fight. They upheld the illogical principle
of “equality in difference,” an idea now being born again.
They fell back into the trap which threatens us once again:
the myth of woman.
Thus it is our historical task, and only ours, to “define what
we call oppression in materialist terms, to make it evident that
women are a class, which is to say that the category “woman”
as well as the category “man” are political and economic
categories not eternal ones. Our fight aims to suppress men as
a class, not through a genocidal, but a political struggle. Once
the class “men” disappears, “women” as a class will disappear
as well, for there are no slaves without masters. Our first task,
it seems, is to always thoroughly dissociate “women” (the class
within which we fight) and “woman,” the myth. For “woman”
does not exist for us: it is only an imaginary formation, while
“women” is the product of a social relationship. We felt this
strongly when everywhere we refused to be called a “woman’s
liberation movement.”
Furthermore, we have to destroy the myth inside and outside
ourselves.“Woman” is not each one of us, but the political and
ideological formation which negates “women” (the product
of a relation of exploitation). “Woman” is there to confuse us,
6
One Is Not Born A Woman
to hide the reality “women.” In order to be aware of being a
class and to become a class we first have to kill the myth of
“woman” including its most seductive aspects (I think about
Virginia Woolf when she said the first task of a woman writer
is to kill “the angel in the house”). But to become a class
we do not have to suppress our individual selves, and since
no individual can be reduced to her/his oppression we are
also confronted with the historical necessity of constituting
ourselves as the individual subjects of our history as well.
I believe this is the reason why all these attempts at “new”
definitions of woman are blossoming now. What is at stake
(and of course not only for women) is an individual definition
as well as a class definition. For once one has acknowledged
oppression, one needs to know and experience the fact that
one can constitute oneself as a subject (as opposed to an
object of oppression), that one can become someone in spite
of oppression, that one has one’s own identity. There is no
possible fight for someone deprived of an identity, no internal
motivation for fighting, since, although I can fight only with
others, first I fight for myself.
The question of the individual subject is historically a difficult
one for everybody. Marxism, the last avatar of materialism,
the science which has politically formed us, does not want
to hear anything about a “subject.” Marxism has rejected
the transcendental subject, the subject as constitutive of
knowledge, the “pure” consciousness. All that thinks per
se, before all experience, has ended up in the garbage can
of history, because it claimed to exist outside matter, prior
to matter, and needed God, spirit, or soul to exist in such
a way. This is what is called “idealism.” As for individuals,
they are only the product of social relations, therefore their
consciousness can only be “alienated.” (Marx, in The German
Ideology, says precisely that individual of the dominating class
are also alienated, although they are the direct producers of
the ideas that alienate the classes oppressed by them. But since
they draw visible advantages from their own alienation they
Monique Wittig
7
can bear it without too much suffering.) There exists such a
thing as class consciousness, but a consciousness which does
not refer to a particular subject, except as participating in
general conditions of exploitaion at the same time as the other
subjects of their class, all sharing the same consciousness.As for
the practical class problems - outside of the class problems as
traditionally defined - that one could encounter (for example,
sexual problems), they were considered “bourgeois” problems
that would disappear with the final victory of the class
struggle. “Individualistic,” “subjectivist,” “petit bourgeois,”
these were the labels given to any person who had shown
problems which could not be reduced to the “class struggle”
itself.
Thus Marxism has denied the members of oppressed classes
the attribute of being a subject. In doing this, Marxism, because
of the ideological and political power this “revolutionary
science” immediately exercised upon the workers’ movement
and all other political groups, has prevented all categories of
oppressed peoples from constituting themselves historically as
subjects (subjects of their struggle, for example). This means
that the “masses” did not fight for themselves but for the party
or its organizations. And when an economic transformation
took place (end of private property, constitution of the
socialist state), no revolutionary change took place within the
new society, because the people themselves did not change.
For women, Marxism had two results. It prevented them
from being aware that they are a class and therefore from
constituting themselves as a class for a very long time, by
leaving the relation “women/men” outside of the social order,
by turning it into a natural relation, doubtless for Marxists the
only one, along with the relation of mothers to children, to
be seen this way, and by hiding the class conflict between men
and women behind a natural division of labor (The German
Ideology). This concerns the theoretical (ideological) level.
On the practical level, Lenin, the party, all the communist
8
One Is Not Born A Woman
parties up to now, including all the most radical political
groups, have always reacted to any attempt on the part of
women to reflect and form groups based on their own class
problem with an accusation of divisiveness. By uniting, we
women are dividing the strength of the people. This means
that for the Marxists women belong either to the bourgeois
class or to the proletariat class, in other words, to the men
of these classes. In addition, Marxist theory does not allow
women any more than other classes of oppressed people to
constitute themselves as historical subjects, because Marxism
does not take into account the fact that a class also consists
of individuals one by one. Class consciousness is not enough.
We must try to understand philosophically (politically) these
concepts of “subject” and “class consciousness” and how
they work in relation to our history. When we discover that
women are the objects of oppression and appropriation, at
the very moment that we become able to perceive this, we
become subjects in the sense, of cognitive subjects through
an operation of abstraction. Consciousness of oppression is
not only a reaction to (fight against) oppression. It is also the
whole conceptual reevvaluation of the social world, its whole
reorganization with new concepts, from the point of view of
oppression. It is what I would call the science of oppression
created by the oppressed. This operation of understanding
realiry has to be undertaken by every one of us: call it a
subjective, cognitive practice. The movement back and forth
between the levels of reality (the conceptual reality and the
material reality of oppression, which are both social realities)
is accomplished through language.
It is we who historically must undertake the task of defining
the individual subject in materialist terms.This certainly seems
to be an impossibility since materialism and subjectivity have
always been mutually exclusive. Nevertheless and rather than
despairing of ever understanding, we must recognize the need
to reach subjectivity in the abandonment by many of us to
the myth “woman” (the myth of woman being only a snare
Monique Wittig
9
that holds us up). This real necessity for everyone to exist as
an individual, as well as a member of a class, is perhaps the first
condition for the accomplishment of a revolution, without
which there can be no real fight or transformation. But the
opposite is also true; without class and class consciousness there
are no real subjects, only alienated individuals. For women to
answer the question of the individual subject in materialist
terms is first to show, as the lesbians and feminists did, that
supposedly “subjective,” “individual,” “private” problems are
in fact social problems, class problems; that sexuality is not for
women an individual and subjective expression, but a social
institution of violence. But once we have shown that all socalled personal problems are in fact class problems, we will
still be left with the question of the subject of each singular
woman - not the myth, but each one of us. At this point, let
us say that a new personal and subjective definition for all
humankind can only be found beyond the categories of sex
(woman and man and that the advent of individual subjects
demands first destroying the categories of sex, ending the
use of them, and rejecting all sciences which still use these
categories as their fundamentals (practically all social sciences).
To destroy “woman” does not mean that we aim, short of
physical destruction, to destroy lesbianism simultaneously
with the categories of sex, because lesbianism provides for
the moment the only social form in which we can live freely.
Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the
categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated
subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or
politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is
a specific social relation to a man, a relation that we have
previously called servitude,16 a relation which implies personal
and physical obligation as well as economic obligation (“forced
residence,”17 domestic corvée, conjugal duties, unlimited
production of children, etc.), a relation which lesbians escape
by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual.We are escapees
from our class in the same way as the American runaway
10
One Is Not Born A Woman
slaves were when escaping slavery and becoming free. For us
this is an absolute necessity; our survival demands that we
contribute all our strength to the destruction of the class of
women within which men appropriate women. This can be
accomplished only by the destruction of heterosexuality as
a social system which is based on the oppression of women
by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference
between the sexes to justify this oppression.
Monique Wittig
11
Notes:
1. Christine Delphy “Pour un feminisme materialiste,” L’Arc 61 (1975). Translated as
“For a Materialist Feminism,” Feminist I ssues 1, no. 2 (Winter 1981)
2. Colette Guillaumin, “Race et Nature: Systeme des marques, idee de groupe
naturel et rapports sociaux,” Pluriel, no. 11 (1977). Translated: “Race and Nature:The
System of Marks, the Idea of a Natural Group and Social Relationships,” Feminist
Issues 8, no 2 (Fall 1988).
3. I use the word society with an extended anthropological meaning; strictly
speaking, it does not refer to societies, in that lesbian societies do not exist completely
autonomously from heterosexual social systems.
4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Bantam, 1952), p. 249
5. Redstockings, Feminist Revoluton (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 18
6. Andrea Dworkin, “Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and
Deadly Idea,” Heresies 6:46
7. Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links Books, 1974), p. 15
8. Dworkin, op. cit.
9. Guillaumin, op. cit.
10. de Beauvoir, op. cit.
11. Guillaumin, op. cit.
12. Dworkin, op. cit.
13. Atkinson, p. 6: “If feminism has any logic at all, it must be working for a sexless
society.”
14. Rosalind Rosenberg, “In search of Woman’s Nature,” Feminist Studies 3, no 1/2
(1975): 144
15. Ibid., p. 146
16. In an article published in L’Idiot International (Mai 1970), whose original title
was “Pour un mouvement de liberation des femmes” (For a Women’s Liberation
Movement”).
17. Christiane Rochefort, Les stances a Sophie (Paris: Grasset, 1963)
Republished 2010
“It is our historical
task, and only
ours, to define
what we call
oppression in
materialist terms,
to make it evident
that women are
a class, which is
to say that the
category “woman”
as well as the
category “man”
are political
and economic
categories not
eternal ones.
Our fight aims
to suppress
men as a class,
not through a
genocidal, but a
political struggle.
Once the class
“men” disappears,
“women” as
a class will
disappear as well,
for there are no
slaves without
masters...”